I'm an American writer who lives in Ireland, so I know the guffaws and inspiration that come with upping sticks and moving abroad with a family in tow. I've written two books about my experiences in Ireland, Jaywalking with the Irish (Lonely Planet, 2004) and Ireland Unhinged (Council Oak Books and Random House, 2011). I've written about travel, religion and science for ForbesLife, Discover, Omni, Psychology Today, Boston Globe, New York Times, Irish Times, and the Sunday Times. I previously produced publications on the medical device and diamond industries. I divide my time between Cork City and a cottage beside a mysterious salmon river called the Blackwayer.

6/29/2013 @ 3:50PM3,594 views

New Tape Recordings Reveal Brazen Chicanery At Irish Bank That Soaked Its Nation And The EU

Shocking tape recordings released this week display the heads of Anglo Irish Bank, the private bank favored by the wealthiest speculators and property developers behind the Irish boom, literally laughing about the subterfuges they played straight through to the European Central Bank and its eventual bailout billions. The Irish, and the Germans who so heavily contributed to staunch the country’s drift into complete bankruptcy, are aghast at this snickering and utterly cavalier cynicism, which has dominated the Republic of Ireland’s media all week.

A commentator on RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, said on Thursday, “It feels like the whole country is crying again.” Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she viewed these recordings with “contempt.”

If any one institution personified the financial indiscipline and roguery that have come back to haunt much of the periphery of the EU – Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and eventually Cyprus – it was Anglo Irish Bank, headquartered in a new Dublin house of glass beside a statue of a naked Celtic goddess climbing up the walls. In that building with an incongruous Zen garden, I met in 2008 speculators still swearing they would soon build an entire new city within China. Up above was the private banking HQ of Anglo Irish Bank. Regularly gathering there were some of the more ignominious players at the strings of Ireland’s boom: the bank’s former chief executive Sean Fitzpatrick, awaiting trial on 16 charges of financial malfeasance; David Drumm, a succeeding former chief executive on the bankruptcy docket; Willie McAteer, the former chief “risk officer” of the bank now charged with “giving unlawful financial assistance” regarding a so-called “golden circle” of insiders who helped themselves to huge interest free loans from the bank’s tills to fund their personal schemes…the list is long.

Another fixture was John Bowe, Anglo Irish’s executive in charge of “capital markets.” It is his voice that is heard on a particularly egregious tape from September 17, 2008 – two days after the fall of Lehman Brothers – that was made public by the Irish Independent this week. In this phone call Bowe brazenly boasts about the guile he used when approaching the Central Bank of IrelandBank of Ireland, with the message to carry on to the European Central Bank, for an immediate bail out of 7 billion euros, when he knew that figure was roughly a quarter of what he would be looking for once he had properly spread his menace and stoked a clubhouse panic to play a potential Ireland-wide panic on his own terms.

On the tape, Bowe is asked by his colleague Peter Fitzgerald how he came up with the 7 billion initial figure.

Bowe: “Just as Drummer [David Drumm above] would say, ‘picked it out of my arse.’

Fitzgerald had asked: “And is that 7 billion term?”

Bowe: “This is 7 million bridging.”

Fitzgerald: “Yeah.”

Bowe: “So it is bridged until we can pay you back… which is never.”

At that point they both burst out laughing. And it gets worse, Al Capone worse.

Bowe: “We can rebuild the liquidity off our loan book, but what can we do, we can’t do it now and the balance sheet is leaking now. Yeah, and that number is seven, but the reality is that we need more than that. But the strategy here is you pull them, you get them to write a big (check), and they have to keep, they have to support their money.”

In another tape Bowe and colleagues would be caught on tape singing like drunks at closing time “Deutschland Uber Alles” after they sought more dough, ultimately, out of the Deutsch.

Drumm himself gives orders “to stick the fingers up” to the Irish financial regulator’s concerns about Anglo’s various abuses of the bank’s guarantees. He also says the only way to proceed is to threaten the total collapse of Anglo Irish and with it perhaps the Irish economy if he and colleagues don’t get what they want fast. He suggests saying to the regulators at the Irish Central Bank, “Do you want the f…ing keys now? I can give them to you.” His meaning is that if he doesn’t get his way he will just walk away from an Anglo Irish in flames, and his country be damned.

Das Bild, Der Spiegel, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and Wall Street Journal have picked up on the story, among many others; and a deputy of Angela Merkel ‘s ruling Christian Democratic Union party in Germany, Michael Fuchs, said on Irish radio three days ago that the Anglo Irish bunch “should be in jail.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine used bizarre German irony to say the same, something about putting such shady characters to rot in a corn bag forever.

Perhaps the most trenchant analysis of these revelations has come from Fintan O’Toole writing in today’s Irish Times. He calls the tone of these bankers “arrogant, cynical, greedy, contemptuous, myopic and feckless.”

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